BY MATT STOUT
Chris Bridges made it a habit to be the first one on and the last one off the ice during his career with the John Stark hockey team.
A soccer-player-turned-hockey-player, Bridges barely knew how to skate four years ago when Stark coach Ed Campbell approached him about joining the program. The extra effort was nothing new for Bridges, the varsity team’s goaltender the last two years.
But this slow exit from the rink was for a different reason.
Following Stark’s 3-1 loss to Souhegan of Amherst in the Division III championship on March 11, while everyone else gradually trudged off the Verizon Wireless Arena ice, Bridges stayed.
He hugged his fellow seniors, capping the greatest season in Stark’s program history. After they left, he skated over to shake hands with the referees. When they were gone, he spoke with opposing coaches, and when they departed, he did the same with his Souhegan counterpart, Joey Giarusso.
“He’s probably the one who’s going to miss it the most because he feels like he got cheated,” Campbell said of Bridges. “I said to him, ‘Chris, you really had an opportunity you never thought you could have.’ But I think he just wanted to eat up the moments as long as he could. I think he just wanted to keep the memories.”
After a career like Bridges’, the memories won’t be soon forgotten. From first practice to final game, his rise from relative beginner to backstop of a state-title contender is a lesson in how far hard work and determination can take an individual.
Never a hockey player before his freshman year, the Weare native drove the 45 minutes each week for the last three seasons to work with Rob Day, the goalie coach of the New Hampshire Jr. Monarchs. He went alone to public skating, decked out in all his pads, to teach himself how to skate. He spent summer afternoons in Campbell’s driveway on roller blades practicing save after save as his coach fired away.
It all paid off as he earned the starting goalie spot as a junior before successive head and groin injuries sidelined him for the start of this year. But he returned to boast a 3.68 goals against average, good for sixth in the league, and tie for the most shutouts among D-III goalies with two.
Bridges saved perhaps his best performances for the postseason, though, stopping a combined 52 shots in wins over Portsmouth and No. 1 Somersworth in the quarterfinals and semifinals, respectively, before nearly stealing the game from Souhegan with 14 more stops.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that if he had not been injured this year, he would have been all-state first-team,” said Stark assistant coach Tim Herbert, who coached Bridges for two years on the junior varsity team.
“But,” he continued, “to just go from a kid who said, ‘OK I’ll give it a shot,’ to riding the bench, not even being the starter for the JV team, until he got that one shot at the end of his sophomore year to now ... This is like a Hollywood story for this kid.”
It’s a story worth retelling.
Butt first …
Jake Philibert, John Stark’s senior captain, remembers the exact moment he first saw Bridges skate out for the Generals. Sitting at center ice during one of the 2003-04 season’s first practices, Philibert said Campbell had an announcement to make.
“Coach said, ‘We have a new player who’s going to play goalie for us,’” Philibert said. “And he came out as we were all sitting in the middle with the coach, and the second he hit the ice, he fell right on his back. Everybody started laughing.”
“From there,” Bridges said, “you could tell it was going to be a long haul.”
At first it was. A soccer goalie playing on Stark’s freshman team, Bridges impressed Campbell with his aggressiveness to make any save he could. With two senior goaltenders and no freshmen slated to join the program, Campbell was only watching the soccer games because he needed to find any goalie he could.
After the team posted a few fliers around school, Herbert helped find Bridges, and, after the player and Campbell talked by phone, Bridges was officially recruited to join the team. Always interested in hockey but never in the financial position to shell out money for pads or to play, Bridges played his first year on Stark with equipment the booster club bought.
That first winter was rocky, he remembered, but even as the backup on the JV team, he never doubted his decision to take up the sport.
“I really do love the sport, and I just wanted to do well,” Bridges said. “It was frustrating in certain practices when I would do well, and then I would come out the next day, and I would be letting everything in. But I knew I had to stick with it.”
His persistence paid off. After gradually improving that first year, Stark coaches sent Bridges and another converted goalie to Day, an instructor known for turning local talent into local stars.
During the next three years, Bridges practiced everything with Day. They went over basic technique, positioning, rebound control and even meditated to help Bridges focus. Day – a late-bloomer himself who didn’t play hockey until high school – understood exactly what Bridges was going through.
“He didn’t have any bad habits when he got to me,” Day said. “In fact, he didn’t know what to do. ‘Hold my glove here? No problem.’ So it was like, boom, this is the way we’re going to learn, and this is what we’re going to do.”
With the team hosting Con-Val at the end of Bridges’ sophomore year and the Generals already out of playoff contention, Bridges got his first chance to show his improvement on the varsity level against the eventual state champ.
The 7-2 score wasn’t pretty but the nearly 50 saves Bridges made, Herbert said, were.
“That was a light bulb for all of us,” he said.
Not an ending
Bridges’ solid play the next two seasons helped buoy Stark to the best two-year stretch in program history. A semifinal berth capped his junior year before the Generals finished fourth this season with a program-best 12-5-1 mark.
It followed that with the magical playoff run and the near upset of defending champion Souhegan.
After Stark made its way back to the high school for refreshments following the loss, Campbell dropped his bag off at his truck, walked into the building and was greeted at the door immediately by one of his players.
It was Bridges.
“And he says, ‘We have nothing to be ashamed of,’” Campbell recalled. “’Just think about it, Coach. Four years ago I wasn’t even a goalie. You gave me an opportunity, and look at what we did.’”
Bridges will try to do even more when he enrolls at New England College next fall and takes a run at making the school’s JV team. Perhaps a long shot to ever see varsity, Campbell said, Bridges has made a habit of turning long shots into bull’s-eyes since day one.
“I’ve actually come a long way since freshman year, falling on my butt,” Bridges said. “I won’t be disappointed as long as I’m playing the game.”